I was born in 1947 to farming parents in Victoria, Australia. After growing up on a dairy farm, the family moved to Albany Western Australia to take up virgin farmland when I was 14.
Leaving school aged 15, I worked for my father as an offside/ relief semi-trailer driver for a business he had commenced to sustain the family while the farm was being developed. From that age I worked in a multitude of jobs including as a stockman, truck and tractor driver, slaughterman, cray fisherman, factory process worker, potato farmer, wool presser and shearer.
Aged 23, the Australian Regular Army beckoned in 1970, and within seven months I found myself in what was South Vietnam fighting the war against so-called communist aggression. After serving there for 15 months in four different infantry battalions, usually as a machine gunner, I transferred to the Military Police upon my return in 1972. Soon after, I transferred internally to the criminal investigation branch.
I spent 15 years in the army and discharged, taking up employment with telecom (later Telstra) as a criminal investigator. I trained to become a security consultant and ultimately became a security consultant, followed by the position of sub-regional manager of the branch for country Queensland, Australia. I spent nine years with Telstra until our branch was made redundant.
Moving into private enterprise, I became an irrigation contractor, installing domestic, industrial and commercial systems. After selling that business and in partnership with a friend, my next business was a manufacturing export plant in Brisbane. Moving on, I bought a Video Ezy franchise in a suburb of Ipswich, followed by a Cartridge World franchise in Brisbane.
My world then fell apart. I left my wife of 29 years and two children, and moved back to Western Australia with mental health illness. I remained there for five years trying to reinvent myself and looking after my mother. She passed away and I returned to Queensland.
I remarried after I was wiped out in the floods of 2011 in the Brisbane Valley and had moved to the Fraser coast of Queensland. My wife passed away shortly after our marriage and my grief resulted in selling up and moving to a small island off the coast of Queensland.
The move to a small island was unsuccessful and I subsequently sought companionship through the means of on-line dating sites. I soon met and fell in love with a wonderful woman from the Gold Coast. Before long I had moved to her place at Palm Beach and I sold my place on the island. Therese and I moved to Currumbin Waters after she sold her home and we renovated the home we bought there. We married during Covid, and in 2025 my mental illness comprised of PTSD with the inherent anxiety and depression, became so bad I attempted suicide twice and was admitted to a psychiatric facility at Robina on the Gold Coast. Through the wonderful support of Therese and the psychiatric treatment and nursing, I am now on the road to recovery. It has been a long, tortuous journey.
Ric and his wife Therese live happily on the Gold Coast Queensland, with their Golden Retriever named Mintie.
